DCC Book 8 spoilers below
So a friend of mine and I were trying to figure out the strangeness of Carl and Donut’s ‘what if’ apartment, and what exactly it was about. So I figured I’d post here and see if I can get some new takes on it.
To start, given that (as far as we know) every other team leader’s room was the one they were required to pass through, we know this hypothetical was meant for Donut (also means there was probably a Carl room somewhere else in the apartment that went unexplored, worth keeping in mind).
Second, by the AI’s own admission the hypotheticals it was considering were those where someone in said crawler’s life made a different decision; the changes aren’t just tiny butterfly effect things, someone makes a different choice.
Third, and very important, is that Donut probably knows what the change is, while Carl does not. Her bringing up the day the police came to their apartment apropos of nothing tells me she knows what’s different.
My first assumption is that it was a basic change around where Carl assumed; Marjory cut off ties with her toxic ex. From there it’d have a chain effect of ‘Gravy doesn’t have to be let out as often to keep Bill from attacking him’ which leads to ‘Gravy was never outside the night of the collapse’ and thus ‘Carl and Donut never enter the dungeon’, QED. The thing is that doesn’t really change Carl or Donut’s pre-crawl lives at all, and also the bag of special cat food goes unexplained. Its adequate but not satisfactory.
So, let’s think about what Donut brought up after entering the apartment. Something very bad happened to Marjory, and we can presume Donut remembers what that thing was (and by extension, Bea). It’s heavily implied Bill was involved in whatever happened, but the presence of Donut’s car food implies the actual change in events exists there, regardless of what Bill does.
I’ll stop beating around the bush, I think Bea was definitely involved in whatever happened at Marjory’s apartment, and that the ‘what if’ decision was her deciding to do something different. If she’s the type of person to get someone fired over maybe having an okay relationship with her boyfriend, what would she do to someone whose cat was constantly trying to hook up with her show cat?
We know by her own admission she’d call animal control on the cat, to no avail. She’s also the source of calling Gravy ‘Ferdinand’, even after learning the cat’s actual name.
Bea be honest with me did you seriously consider poisoning that cat.
It could be something different, of course. Enabling terrible ex Bill to commit some breaking and entering on their apartment also came to mind. I’m just looking at how she acted around Ferdinand after the Collapse and I wonder if there’s some additional charged emotions there.
I briefly considered Two Cats theory, where Gravy Boat was the original cat, who was killed after Bea targeted homicide, and Ferdinand was the orange cat Marjory got after the incident. But the timeline doesn’t add up, we see Bea still use Ferdinand and Gravy Boat interchangeably as names, even if she prefers the former, and also Ferdinand in this case probably wouldn’t really know Bill that well, especially if it was presumed he did the cat murder.
More than anything I think, in regards to the AI, its been considering Donut’s capacity for violence a lot since the last floor’s War Crimes incident. So I could see the hypothetical it lands on being one that considers how that violence may have been inherited from Bea.
Lastly I’ll mention the ‘Bea left Carl’ option, where the cat food ended up with Marjory just because Donut wasn’t around anymore. Makes sense, but why bring up the criminal incident, and why choose Marjory’s apartment to convey that outcome.
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