BFDI Prequels | A BFDI Fanfic

Chapter 30: Not Quite the End

The day had finally come. The day all speaker boxes had been waiting for.

In his tiny phone booth, the grey speaker box completed the final read of his report. His mind swarmed with a wave of newfound knowledge and understanding. What had started as a coincidence led him down an infinite rabbit hole. Except it wasn't infinite. He had come out of it. He had come out of it with a new perspective of the world.

His delve into reality TV perplexed him. It was such a simple concept, yet the intricacies of it all drew him in like a magnet. Everything from the contests to the hosts to the characters that lived inside the television. Even the business side of things: the sponsors, the advertisements. He poured over every detail, every pixel, trying to comprehend what it all meant. And after absorbing every season of every show he could find, he was confident to say that he truly understood that fundamental building block of Earth programming. He looked back at his notes, knowing that what he learned would never impact the legacy of the speaker boxes in any way. A scout was all he was—and a bad one at that. Locked inside an outhouse-sized cell performing menial labour for a causeless effort.

Then, a knock on the door.

"Hey, uh, are you still in there?" his supervisor asked, "You can come out now, the shift is over."

He stepped back out into the wider space of the LBAL. Several more defunct rejects circled the table in the center, dropping off their reports—each no more than two or three pages. The several hundred sheets of paper he carried around felt like a block of lead. They landed on the table with a small earthquake. And that's when the announcement came.

"Code 1338. All crew members must report to the loading bays immediately. This is not a drill. This is not a drill!"

His auditory sensors rang with the phrase. Every speaker box worth their power knew what it meant. As a scout, he had been trained with the exact steps to dealing with it, down to the millimetre. Despite this, the shapes around him made no moves to leave the room.

"Shouldn't we respond to the call?" he suggested passive-aggressively.

"Us? Nah. Not once have we ever been called to anything remotely important," they sighed.

A new voice came onto the intercom. "That includes those in the LBAL department. Please report immediately. Anyone disobeying this order will be marked as a traitor and melted down into scrap."

"N-never m-mind then, let's get moving."

<=======>

The loading bays were a lot larger than he remembered. Then again, the last time he was there, he was under arrest—usually not an occasion where one decides to sightsee and pull out a ruler to measure the dimensions of a flying saucer garage.

This time, things were much different. Millions of speaker boxes packed into the space, with thousands more flowing through every door along the outside. The boxes stood in perfect rows and columns; not a single rectangle was out of place. Ignoring his bunch, of course.

On the far side of the bays were massive assemblies. A tall glass tank with gold and silver accents that was easily taller than 10 speaker boxes stacked on top of one another. Each tank was balancing on a comically large drill, supported by an arrangement of spider-like legs that protruded from a thick ring between the drill and the tank. The whole contraption—several metres in width—was carried by eight Transport Vehicles in an octagonal pattern surrounding the structure, attaching themselves to the centre using the same tow cables that had latched onto his craft. Up and down the aisle, he counted hundreds of these superships. Some of which had already begun boarding; little lines of speaker boxes broke off of the main block like streams off a river.