Redshirts

believe that?”
    “Yes,” Dahl said. “I do.”
    “Then maybe you can believe this,” Hanson said. “Whether you’re an extra or the hero, this story is about to end. When it’s done, whatever you want to be will be up to you and only you. It will happen away from the eyes of any audience and from the hand of any writer. You will be your own man.”
    “If I exist when I stop being written,” Dahl said.
    “There is that,” Hanson said. “It’s an interesting philosophical question. But if I had to guess, I’d guess that your creator would say to you that he would want you to live happily ever after.”
    “That’s just a guess,” Dahl said.
    “Maybe a little more than a guess,” Hanson said. “But I will say this, though: You were right.”
    “About what?” Dahl said.
    “That now I’ve done what I was supposed to do,” Hanson said. “But now I have to go do the other thing I’m supposed to do, which is assume my post. See you at dinner, Andy?”
    Dahl grinned. “Yes,” he said. “If any of us are around for it.”
    “Great,” Hanson said. “See you then.” And he wandered off.
    Dahl sat there for a few more minutes, thinking about everything that had happened and everything that Hanson said. And then he got up and went to his station on the bridge. Because whether fictional or not, on a spaceship, a television show or in something else entirely, he still had work to do, surrounded by his friends and the crew of the Intrepid .
    And that’s just what he did, until the day six months later when a systems failure caused the Intrepid to plow into a small asteroid, vaporizing the ship and killing everyone on board instantly.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
    No, no, I’m just fucking with you.
    They all lived happily ever after.
    Seriously.

 
    CODA I:
    First Person
     
    CODA I: FIRST PERSON
    Hello, Internet.
    There isn’t any good way to start this, so let me just jump right in.
    So, I am a scriptwriter for a television show on a major network who just found out that the people he’s been making up in his head (and killing off at the rate of about one an episode) are actually real. Now I have writer’s block, I don’t know how to solve it, and if I don’t figure it out soon, I’m going to get fired. Help me.
    And now I just spent 20 minutes looking at that last paragraph and feeling like an asshole. Let me break it down further to explain it to you a little better.
    “Hello, Internet”: You know that New Yorker cartoon that has a dog talking to another dog by a computer and saying, “On the Internet, no one knows you’re a dog”? Yeah, well, this is that.
    No, I’m not a dog. But yes, I need some anonymity here. Because holy shit, look what I just wrote up there. That’s not something you can just say out loud to people. But on the Internet? Anonymously? Might fly.
    “I am a scriptwriter…”: I really am. I’ve been working for several years on the show, which (duh) has been successful enough to have been around for several years. I don’t want to go into too much more detail about that right now, because remember, I’m trying to have some anonymity here to work through this thing I’ve been dealing with. Suffice to say that it’s not going to win any major Emmys, but it’s still the sort of show that you, my dear Internet, would probably watch. And that in the real world, I have an IMDB page. And it’s pretty long. So there.
    “Who just found out the people he’s been making up in his head are real”: Yes, I know. I know . Didn’t I just say “holy shit” two paragraphs ago about it? Don’t you think I know how wobbly-toothed, speed freak crazy it sounds? I do. I very very very very much do. If I didn’t think it was completely bugfuck crazy, I’d be writing about it on my own actual blog (if I had my own actual blog, which I don’t, because I work on a weekly television series, and who has the time ) and finding some way to go full Whitley Strieber on it. I don’t want that. That’s a lifestyle. A whacked-out, late night talking to the tinfoil-hatted on your podcast lifestyle. I don’t want that. I just want to be able to get back to my own writing.
    But still: The people I wrote in my scripts exist. I know because I met them, swear to God, right there in the flesh, I could reach out and touch them. And whenever I kill one of them off in my scripts, they actually die. To me, it’s just putting down words on a page. To them, it’s falling off a building, or