Last Dispatch: Part 6

This story was made using the solo RPG Last Dispatch, by Symbolic City.

CEO Kennly was sitting alone in his dark office, his finger aimlessly brushing a pen back and forth across his desk. The slow and steady movement of his arm added to the uncanny stillness of the rest of his body gave him an air of focus. It turned what Yoli would have thought was the listlessness of despair into an air of deep thought.

Yoli stepped forward. The office was remarkably well kept, compared to the rest of the station; the former citizens of Tethys Megastation had not bothered keeping things orderly for their exodus.

Kennly looked up, his eyes sagging with exhaustion. “Ah,” he said at last. “I should have known.”

Yoli rubbed their arm. They didn’t know what to say. They knew how to ask questions, not express sympathy or urge action. After so many years of asking questions, they had lost the skill.

After a moment, Kennly leaned forward over his desk. “I suppose you want a quote.”

“If you have something to say,” Yoli said, their throat dry, “I’ll listen.”

“Oh, yes,” Kennly slowly lifted himself from his seat, “You’ll listen. You always listen, writing things down and sending them back to your masters on Terra. It’s a good cover, isn’t it? Being a journalist?”

Yoli shook their head. “Cover?”

“I know what you really are,” Kennly’s smile would have been manic, had his exhaustion not been plain on his face. “Sneaking about, sticking your nose in…who are you spying for? The Modal Bloc? Steel Dawn?”

“I’m not a…” Yoli paused. The glint in Kennly’ eye was worrying. “I…I spy for everyone.” It wasn’t much of a lie.

“A mercenary spy?” Kennly raised an eyebrow before shaking his head. “Well, I suppose there’s no reason why spies shouldn’t join the marketplace. If soldiers can sell themselves, why not spies?” Kennly sat back down, resting his head in his hands. “Everyone wants money.”

Yoli didn’t reply. What were they doing here? The shuttles were filling, and soon the entire Megastation would become a cold and dark tomb. Tethys was dead, and in the face of that cold hard fact, Yoli wanted to…what, talk to the one who had lost the most?

Yoli had learned to tamp down their instinct to speculate. Being a good journalist was like being a detective; if you tried to fill in the gaps with guesses, you could easily miss important details.

But if they had to guess, they would have said that there was something different about CEO Kennly. The others had been fighting for ideals, struggling for survival, or defending the planet. The Gleaners too, Yoli had truly believed.

But then, after it all went wrong, after the Xenoethicists proclaimed the planet’s ecosystem was a living entity in its own right, after Homestation Defense tried to force everyone back to work in spite of the Lifeboat Corp’s threats, after five different sections had been shut-down in retaliation, after it became clear that the station could no longer function, CEO Kennly had been the one to put the final nail in the coffin.

At least, that was what Yoli believed now.

“You may not have heard,” Yoli said, “the station is being abandoned.”

“May not have…how on earth do you think I didn’t hear?” Kennly asked, shaking his head.

“In my experience,” Yoli shrugged with a small smile, “CEOs rarely get told bad news.”

“I was never told bad news,” Kennly rubbed his forehead. “Problems must be fixed. Anyone who told me bad news were telling me they had given up. Quit. Weren’t doing their jobs and yet still expected a paycheck.”

“Quitting is failure,” Yoli had heard it before, “and you aren’t one to suffer quitters.”

“Sure,” Kennly sighed. “There. That’s your quote. Satisfied?” He picked up the pen and gripped it in his hand like a sword. He clenched his teeth and looked for all the world like he was going to stab himself in the chest with it.

His arm quivered, his eyes closed, and finally he set the pen down again. “I bet you’re here for the files, aren’t you? Our proprietary technology? There’s a thousand companies who would pay billions for a copy.”

“You deleted all the files,” Yoli said, giving voice to the mystery. “The whole station network.”

“And blew up the equipment,” Kennly smiled. “Yes, there, another quote. Another admission. I sabotaged Fresh-co property. It was my duty, to keep proprietary technology out of foreign hands.”

“Foreign?” Yoli moved closer. The air felt stale.

“Competitors,” Kennly’s smile became a grimace. “Everyone fighting for the same slice of the pie. It doesn’t matter what you call them; foreigners, families, aliens, low-class…they’re competition.”

“Not on Tethys,” Yoli said before they realized what they were admitting to. Tethys was dead. A Megastation survived only if the people worked together.

Kennly didn’t bother to point out their mistake. “I can be brought up on charges, you know. I committed sabotage, I erased a company datastore, I…were there any casualties?”

Yoli blinked at Kennly’s tone, a sudden burst of concern in a mist of careless musing. “Casualties?”

“I suppose it wasn’t me, exactly,” his disinterested tone had already returned. “I don’t do dirty work, I hire people. I pay them to do it for me…It’s a funny thing, isn’t it? As CEO I’m responsible for everything that happened, and I didn’t plant the charges or upload the virus…”

“CEOs hire people so they won’t be responsible,” Yoli said. “So you didn’t have to set the bomb yourself. You won’t be brought up on charges, the people you hired will. Even if you are, and if you’re convicted, your punishment won’t be as severe.”

“Maybe,” Kennly shrugged. “It doesn’t matter, I suppose. Were there casualties? No, don’t tell me. You know how it all went down, don’t you? You’ve been here since the beginning. Almost twenty years, now…Do you know when it all went wrong?”

Yoli worked their hands together, kneading the joints of their fingers. “Look. I don’t know anything about it. I’m not paid to judge, just to report. To tell others what happened.”

“And what happened?” Kennly looked up again, his eyes clear. “You tell me, you’ve seen everything, you looked at everything…when did it go wrong?”

Yoli took a slow breath. “I don’t think anyone can…” they stopped. No, they did know one thing. “I don’t think there is ever a single moment. Things just…keep going wrong. Things can go wrong for years before they go right again.”

Kennly stared. Then he smiled. Then he laughed. “Well, little spy…tell me, were things going right before? Or are things finally going right now?