Chapter Six [Text]

[thebestseller]

Who: Richard Castle and you
Broadcast: Fleetwide
Action: Windrose if you really want?
When: RIGHT NOW

It was my birthday on the first of the month, and normally I'd have celebrated it, but having my first birthday here and this planet having deadly air have made me want to come clean about something.

I think I might be dead back home.

I don't know for certain, and I never will know unless someone from back home shows up AND they're from further down my timeline. Which is looking less and less likely the longer I'm here.

I'm not asking anyone else to share if they're in the same boat if they don't want to, but I'm still figuring out how to process it, and like I said, it's been hitting me hard lately. So I had to get it out somewhere.

Comments

[thebestseller]

I'm leaning toward them having worked on me, because even if I HAD gotten the antidote, I still had some hospital time facing me. So unless my memories were erased, they had to have given me some medical treatment.

[thezerothlaw]

Their technology does seem quite advanced. Likely, curing this was relatively simple for them.

[thebestseller]

When you consider stuff like the augments, and the way they're able to put us to sleep just like that... I can see it.

So that doesn't help me figure out my fate back home at all.

[thezerothlaw]

Regretfully, it does not.

If it helps, it would seem to me to be unlikely that Atroma would bring you here, go to the effort of curing you, when they are presumably return you to where you had been just to allow you to die.

[thebestseller]

Yeah, that's a good point. They don't seem to like upsetting their audience, and knowing they'd be sending me back just to die in my fiance's care would definitely be upsetting.

[thezerothlaw]

It is also a matter of effort. They would have to actively undo what has been done. Even if I attempt to put aside the travesty that would be allowing you to come to harm, there would have to be a conscious expending of energy to do so.

[thebestseller]

That's a good point, too. I mean, I was pretty much guaranteed dead when they pulled me here. Seems like a lot of effort to go through when they could have just chosen someone who didn't have one foot in the grave.

[That's assuming, of course, Atroma has control over who comes and goes, Castle reminded himself.]

[thezerothlaw]

This too. There are likely trillions of lives available to them who do not need medical attention. And yet, that is not always who they choose.