Face the Truth

Renee Carter has run away. After secretly experiencing Mr. Whittaker's Life After Death program in the portable Imagination Station - an adventure that left her shaken and empty - she has packed up everything she owns and boarded a one-way bus for Chicago.

Back at Whit's End, Connie and Jules piece together what happened. Jules admits she told Renee about the program, not realizing how dangerous it is; Connie explains that it terrified Tom Riley and Eugene and even put Whit in a coma. Searching Renee's lab, Connie finds the mini-discs Renee used to load the program, and then discovers her dorm room stripped bare. Using Renee's password - her dog Cogito's name plus its birthdate - they find a bus-ticket website in her browser history and realize she is headed for Chicago's airport to fly home to Scotland, the place that makes sense to her. Connie hurries off to make a call.

On the bus, Renee tries and fails to write a resignation letter to Mr. Whittaker. Unable to shake the Imagination Station from her mind, she breathes a shaky half-prayer: if God is up there, please help her calm down - or better yet, forget. She drifts off, and a very strange ride begins.

First her friend Horus appears in the aisle, wobbling comically as the bus lurches, crashing into a lady's knitting needles, and insisting he can steady himself with equations. Renee tells him what she saw in the program: it gave her the goal she always wanted, but there was nothing beyond it - it was empty. Horus wonders aloud whether Renee has already chosen a savior; it just happens to be math. His tumbles prove his own point that math can only take a person so far. But Renee decides the program simply had the wrong variable plugged in - Jules's claim that she is a sinner in need of a savior - and declares that she doesn't need one after all. She resolves to skip Scotland and go home, but her seatbelt jams, and Horus cheerfully leaves her stuck.

Next comes Astan Lebernis, the man who once tried to steal her Wetonia program and the Imagination Station technology. He flatters her brilliance and independence, agreeing that someone like her needs no savior - only more knowledge. Yet he admits that an agnostic can never have enough; she will always need a little more than she has. When he invites her to get off with him, she begs for help with the stuck seatbelt. He refuses: "This is your chance to prove you are your own savior." She can't free herself, and he leaves her behind.

Then Darcy appears and asks a question that has haunted Renee: why did Darcy forgive the drunk driver who hit her with his car? Renee admits she doesn't understand it - and that not understanding is exactly what bothers her. Mr. Whittaker joins them, telling Renee she has been riding the fence between belief and unbelief so long she hardly knows who she is. Together they explain that eternal things - right and wrong, beauty, forgiveness, love - point to an eternal God, and that life is about more than knowledge and intellect. It is about faith, which is hard because it means trusting someone besides yourself and giving up control. Suddenly the driver shouts that the engine is on fire and everyone must get off, but Renee is trapped in her seat. When she panics, Darcy dryly observes, "It's a metaphor, Renee." As the danger closes in, Whit urges her to stop struggling and let the one person who can set her free do it: "Let him save you."

Renee jolts awake. The bus has arrived in Chicago, and the whole ordeal was a dream. When the driver offers to help with her tricky seatbelt, she smiles and says she already has some help. Inside the terminal, the real Mr. Whittaker is waiting - Connie called him - and Renee hugs him just to be sure he isn't another vision. She tells him she feels as if she has been wrestling with herself, or maybe with something more, and that while nothing quite makes sense, one thing finally does: when she got on the bus she didn't think she needed a savior, and now she knows she does. Then she asks him the question that changes everything: "What must I do to be saved?" Overjoyed, Whit promises to tell her.