Where Are We? | video; un:b1-of-a-kind

[thelastb1]

[Roger begins a video stream with a screen showing a symbol. It's a triangle, with a wrench radiating out light, with a title in a surprisingly well designed font with one part above and one part below the symbol, saying (in Aurebesh script) "Roger Reviews: The Empty City," as if this is supposed to be some kind of series. It is shortly followed by a caption saying "Where Are We?" before fading out to reveal the interior of an apartment with a mess of blank papers stapled to the wall, creating a collage of blank sheets, with only the same words, "Where Are We?" written in permanent marker at the top. Then, onto the frame walks a battle droid, wearing a greenish-grey leather jacket underneath his transmission backpack, with a mop handle that's had the mop head removed to be like a staff strapped to the back of the jacket, and with a kitchen knife tied to his leg with a belt. He has an open permanent marker in his hand. Evidently he has a presentation prepared.]

Looking through this network, I've seen a lot of questions. How did we get here? Why did we get here? Who brought us here? Where are my friends and family? Will we find out there is one or more spies planted within our midst, or will we kill each other trying to find one? These are all good questions, but it's probably going to take forever for us to get any of the answers.

But I think there's one question we can already come up with some kind of answer for: and that is Where Are We? Where in the universe is this City? There's a lot of information we have on that. [He begins writing down data on the compiled wall canvas.] We're on a planet with a g-force of 1 g, an atmosphere habitable for humans and therefore mostly nitrogen with a little bit of oxygen, with vegetation but seemingly no native fauna, intelligent or otherwise. We have one moon in orbit of us, and are in a star system with one sun.

From what I can gather, this is mostly consistent with a planet called Earth, in a galaxy called Milky Way. [He creates a dot on the canvas away from his list of data, then draws a spiral in such a way that the dot is toward the edge of it.] Apparently this is supposed to be the homeworld of humans, which is confusing because I always thought Coruscant was the human homeworld, but anyway. The only problem with that, aside from the complete lack of animals and how hard it would be get an empty city in a fully populated planet, is that the constellations don't seem to match the ones from Earth. They don't match anywhere in my galaxy, either.

Which leads me to conclude that we are... [He puts the cap on his marker] in the middle of nowhere! I'm pretty sure whoever's done this has taken us so far across the universe that none of us are going to have any idea where we are, not to mention that they're probably using time travel too.

But, I'm hoping maybe that I'm wrong, and one of you in this city can actually recognize these constellations and tell me what they mean.

Comments

[thelastb1]

What? [His response is much shorter than it might otherwise be. There are many possible reasons for a question such as this, bizarre as the idea was that the City was perfect even before the presentation was made. Perhaps the apparent similarity to Earth made it seem perfect somehow until the revelation that it truly wasn't. Or perhaps this commenter had instead wanted to be somewhere far away from Earth and just how similar this planet was thus made it off-putting. Or maybe some miniscule detail in his presentation was undesirable while other aspects were perfect.

There were more troubling ideas as well. Maybe he'd finally cracked through the guise of the operators behind the City somehow. Perhaps he'd somehow accidentally revealed that the city somehow wasn't so perfect as they had planned, perhaps they had even hoped that people simply wouldn't question that the planet they were on was Earth. That idea did bother him, scared him, even, but if that was it he would have just avoided responding to the comment altogether and hoped he hadn't actually attracted the ire of said operators.

There was a final idea, however, that truly disturbed Roger. An eventuality that decades in his galaxy had taught him to expect. That this person's one and only issue with this presentation was the fact that the presenter was a droid.] What do you mean?

[gripper]

( it's still talking to her.

she imagines her fingers tapping against the screen are little nails she's driving into its chest. circuitry sparking, oil leaking, smoke filling her lungs... )

Simply that. I thought this city was nice until ten seconds ago.
Clean. Quiet. A little off by City standards, but it sure beats traffic.

[thelastb1]

[It doesn't take much more thought before he remembers part of why the original message was so unsettling to him. The username, Kromer, which just the previous day had been used to post about looking for heretics. This message, however, despite only being delivered through text and not saying anything explicitly threatening, is much more terrifying, if in part due to what he's realized. He moves his hand to his chest, where he can feel a small kitchen knife that he's stashed in his jacket.

Maybe, he thinks, he can play this off. He tries to say something simple, in his normal tone of voice.] Huh. That's- [It comes out wavering, almost shakily, and he panics. He shuts off the video, ending his presentation.

Quickly he slides a chair to barricade the door of his apartment.]