Okay, well, I think I've gotten enough votes at this point to sense a pattern, so I'm going with it. Also I don't want to wait much longer because I'm scared of losing my muse again.
Chapter Sixty-four
The RAFians gathered in the Media Board again the next morning, in preparation to tally the final vote. Most of them arrived a little early, eager to know the outcome of the question that had been burning in their minds through the previous night.
"Option one," Richard quickly began, addressing the assembled crowd. Not wanting to waste anyone's time. "Do nothing."
Not a single hand rose. Not one RAFian. Richard had been right, it seemed. No RAFian was willing to risk the fate of the world, not when other options existed to save it.
"Option two," Richard continued. "Detonate the facility without warning."
A few hands rose this time, but it was clear that it was not a majority. Asmo, Russell, and Rad were among those who raised their hands, Rad's eyes glowing yellow to signal that this was actually Ma'at who was casting this vote. A few others, almost reluctantly, half-raised their hands, a sick look on their faces, knowing what it meant. Wanting to take the option of lesser risk. But also knowing that in doing so they would become . . . murderers. A hundred people, written off as mere casualties.
Not many RAFians were willing to kill when there was still another option, either. Not much more than they had been willing to risk the end of the world.
"Option three," Richard went on. "Save as many as we can."
The response was more enthusiastic this time. Just over half the hands in the room rose, obvious at a glance that the last option was the winner. Several RAFians must have abstained from voting, because the votes for the second and third options clearly did not add up to the population of the auditorium. But in the end it didn't matter. The winning choice was still clear.
"Option three it is," Richard said, smiling a warm smile. He was glad, although not terribly surprised, that RAF would pick the most hopeful option. Hadn't that been the message of the books, after all? Take whatever chances you're given, and save as many lives as you can?
"We'll split into teams," he said, getting right to the plan. "We're gonna need as many people as we can possibly find, for this to work. And that means hitting the biggest websites we know of." He pointed at a row of chairs, sweeping his finger across the row. "You all take Facebook." He pointed up to the next row. "And you, Twitter." The RAFians assigned to Twitter groaned, but Richard didn't seem to notice. "Youtube for you all, be sure to check the most popular videos, get everyone out of those theatres." He went across the rows, listing off famous websites. DeviantArt, World of Warcraft, Omegle, Failblog, Memebase, Wikipedia, 4chan.
"Oh,
man," Blaze groaned as he was selected for the last one. But Underseen gave him a little nudge, and they looked at each other and shrugged, glad at least to be on the same team. They'd picked a good day to sit next to each other.
Dino, having been standing towards the back, ended up in a group with Saffa, AniDragon, Goose, Cody, and probably about three people Dino didn't recognize. They'd been assigned to search Wikipedia.
Goom threw the switch to take down the firewall that blocked RAF off from the rest of the internet. One by one RAFians seemed to blink out, as each group entered in their respective web addresses in their minds.
Dino and the rest of their 'team' appeared in a library. Except that this library was enormous, with a maze of pathways leading to and from each room. It was easy to glimpse the extent of this place's enormity, since so much of it was open. Each room was connected by dozens of paths to each other room, like being inside a honeycomb or an Escher painting. Rooms stacked on top of other rooms, with staircases leading up and down, pathways crisscrossing every which way. A crazy maze of interconnectedness, a maze that led everywhere.
Like any library, there were people there. Most of the rooms were occupied, people with books out, reading. Unlike most libraries, though, each reader was armed with a pencil, and several of them were erasing and rewriting the books even as they read.
Dino looked down at her arms, taking a moment to take in the transition from dinosaur to human. It was easy to forget that would happen, and it seemed to get stranger every time.
Quickly remembering why they were there in the first place, Cody called out, "HEY!"
Several people wrinkled their foreheads, but didn't look up from their books. They'd just seen the word "HEY" suddenly appear in the midst of their articles. Odd, but probably just some idiot messing around, nothing to be concerned over.
One person, though, turned to look. "Hey," he said, seeing the RAFians. "You really here?"
"Yes, we're really here," Saffa said. "We're innerworlders, like you."
"Come with us, though, and you can leave the internet," Goose offered.
The kid shook his head. "I don't know, man. Is any of this, is it even real? Half the time I think I'm just crazy."
"Crazy's come and gone," Dino pointed out gently. "A while ago. We're offering you the chance to go
home."
"Yeah, okay," he said, seeming to gather his senses a little. "Yeah okay. I'm in."
"This might take a while," Saffa sighed wearily, already impatient. She turned on her heel and strode off down one of the many corridors. The others split up soon thereafter, following Saffa's example. They'd cover more ground if they all went separate ways.
The RAFians who had gone to Facebook were, fortunately, having somewhat better luck than the Wikipedia group. Because of the social nature of the site, several innerworlders had naturally gravitated towards Facebook, to be amongst their friends who had suffered the same fate. Jess, Seal, Lumy, Marie and Bear quickly shepherded together a mass of people as they continued down the blank white corridors, looking for more.
They were almost like Jehovah's Witnesses, Bear thought. Knocking on the doors that were people's profiles, asking if they wanted to be saved. He laughed to himself at the thought.
Meanwhile, Tony was covering his ears against the sheer cacophony of sound that was Twitter. He was on the team with Myitt, Steph, Faerie, and Demos.
"HEY!!" Faerie yelled over the din, commanding all the power she could put behind that one word.
Three, maybe four people were close enough to hear, and looked over. But then they shrugged and went back to inanely gabbing about what they had eaten that day.
"Argh this is POINTLESS!" Myitt yelled, having to raise her voice to be heard. "There's no way any innerworlders would still be hanging around here!"
"You said you want a round of BEER?" Steph shouted back. "This really isn't the time!"
"We need to go somewhere else!" Myitt cried. "I'm thinking one of those cooking sites would be a better place to look! Recipes.com!"
They quickly switched over to the much quieter food site, and breathed a sigh of relief before getting back to the search.
Meanwhile, Blue, Parker, Cloaky, Ouroboros and Gaz were in Youtube, going theatre to theatre, rounding up who they could find. They were having better luck than most of the teams, although not quite as much as the Facebook group. There were only a few innerworlders in any given theatre, so it was slow going, visiting one viewing room after another after another. But, after a while, they had a fairly sizeable crowd following them.
"If I have to listen to one more 'goat that sounds like a human,'" Cloaky muttered to himself. "I think I might go crazy." Nonetheless, he quickly strode away to the next theatre.
"YAAH!" Estelore yelled as the room they were in suddenly started spinning again. They were expecting the motion by now, of course, but it was still jarring as anything.
Omegle, as it turned out, was like some kind of ridiculous carnival ride, on an utterly massive scale. Thousands upon thousands of closed rooms, connected to one another by a psychotic clockwork system of gears, able to rotate in any direction. The whole place was set up so each room would face another room at any given time, allowing the two occupants to speak to one another. But every time someone would pull the lever in their room, that room would rotate, spinning around to face a different room.
Estelore, Noelle, Azguard, Rad, and Aquilai had gotten stuck searching here. Which basically consisted of asking, "Innerworlder?" to each and every room they spun to. Most people had no idea what they were talking about, and when that happened the RAFian would immediately spin away again to the next room. But there was at least a sizeable population of innerworlders here, it seemed. This was a good place to meet other people, after all, and many innerworlders craved that human contact.
But the setup of the site didn't really allow them to shepherd groups of people, like most of the other teams were doing. So the RAFians simply repeated RAF's address, over and over and over, to every innerworlder they met. It was an annoying and arduous task.
After several more hours of searching, as the morning turned into afternoon, almost all of the teams had decided that they'd gathered enough people. A couple of teams had even realized they might as well include a few outerworlders in their searches, as well. After all, the outerworlders, with their empty avatars that would be brought into the real world, could stay behind while the facility detonated, with no risk to their own safety. That ability could potentially come in handy.
They all assembled in RAF, groups of people appearing as each team decided they had searched enough. Before long, the non-RAFians outnumbered the RAFians on the forum, by a factor of several dozen to one. They milled about anxiously, waiting to find out how they were supposed to be able to go home.
Richard was waiting for the last couple of search teams to trickle in, before he began.
"Never, ever going back there again!" Underseen said, making a face, the moment he appeared. He, Blaze, Squall and Ko Ko were leading a gaggle of jeering idiots who seemed to have no idea the seriousness of the situation.
And that was it, the last of the search teams. Richard cleared his throat, but it didn't do much good. Everybody kept right on talking.
"AHEM!" he tried again, and a few people quieted to listen. Good enough. "Listen up, people, because your adventure isn't quite over just yet."
