Afanasy Rumyantsev was the son of a modest but inventive toymaker in Novgorod who established a small shop in the capital shortly before being crushed to death by falling wine barrels. Afanasy had had an unhappy life in Novgorod, and by some reports impregnated a banker’s wife with extremely black hair, which forced their relocation. By 1902 he had taken over his father’s shop and conscripted the elder Rumyantsev’s intricate doll-faces and figurines into infinitely delicate clocks, becoming the premier purveyor of time in Moscow. He spoke to almost no one, but was obsessively passionate about his clocks, often visiting his customers to check on them during holidays. His most popular design was a clock which did not chime the hour, but played a small phonograph hidden in the mechanism, whose amplifying horn opened into a golden iris in the arms of a demon with carnelian feet and a swooning empress at his feet. The wax cylinder within played a charming, if slightly sinister melody, and the demon bent to kiss the empress every hour on the hour.

In exactly twelve of these civilized drawing rooms, the demoniac clock did not play its little song, but instead bellowed forth a scratchy, indistinct dialogue between an older man by the name Innokentiy and a young woman called Nadezhda:

My dearest Nadezhda Semyenovna, do not deny me. Meet me again in this place, at this time, so that I may swallow you whole.

Beneath Innokentiy’s voice the Kremlin carillon solemnly bonged out the hours. The demon bent to kiss his queen.

It cannot be ascertained how many of the recipients of Afanasy’s most special clock were kept awake with those voices in their hearts, but at least three put on their hats and gloves and travelled to the carillon the next day at the hour that tolled on the cylinder. They looked at each other surreptitiously, unwilling to question each other’s motives, but eventually one of them must have discovered the discreet red-tissued package tied to the base of a snowy streetlamp, and another small wax cylinder, which the trio hurried to insert into their demon-clocks and wait for the turn of the hour.

Again the ghostly voices, again the imploring Innokentiy, the reluctant Nadezhda. He promised her jewels and black arts and a throne of silver in exchange for her virtue, she insisted on her husband and her child, who lived in a great house in the country filled to the rafters with gold coins. Their voices were so plaintive and lifelike that the younger son of one of the fateful trio reported that his mother wept to hear the unfortunate Nadia in her travails. Distantly, behind their wretched voices, could be heard the doleful bells of the Novodevichy Convent. It seemed to go on and on, and they seemed unable to stop, unable to let the voices go, until one afternoon when they lost the trail or the demonic clockmaker lost interest, and there was no tissue-wrapped package below the bells at Kolmenskoe. They had no satisfaction: Nadezhda had succumbed only so far as to board the train with her suitor, but had turned back at the last moment. The same mother who wept to hear Nadia’s voice was reportedly inconsolable through the season and did not attend Mass for nearly a year, cradling her clock in her arms as she slept days and weeks into nothingness.

The three leisured souls had followed the story through Moscow high and low, collecting the wax cylinders as fast as Afanasy could pour paraffin into his molds. He kept them moving, running, every day, from clanging, hissing Kurskiy train station to sidewalk violinist with a cylinder in his open case. Much has been written on his motives, but it seems somewhat elegant to imagine that they were his clock, his revolving deathsheads and plowmen, pursuing Innokentiy, pursuing Nadezhda. He sat within his father’s shop, among the doll-faces and clock-gears and imagined them, running in circuits around his Moscow. He did not die until 1911, and so his reason for leaving the lovers forever stranded on a train platform remain his own. An earlier example of the alternate reality game is unlikely to surface.

[[Archive Group: Attic. Lockwords: Tether Systems, Operator Failure, Alternate Distribution Streams, Aristotelian Drive, Karolson Worlds, User Corruption, Mundus Infection. Last Accessed 9.001.6.7.21, UIN# (47)663.5-9]]

What can be positively asserted is this:

On November 12th, 1931 in Marseilles, Godelieve presented her husband with a birthday gift consisting of 165 illustrated cards, something like a complex Tarot, but without divinatory intent. They were a young couple, pregnant with their first child, and Mrs. Lenentine, a gifted artist, had spent the bulk of their engagement in the creation of these cards, which are painted in sepia colors, with a style both elegant and grotesque. Their names were domestic, inventive, archetypal: The Starveling, the Leaning Cabinet, the Stove-Door.

By all accounts, Godelieve was an anti-social and aggressively introverted woman, warm only to her husband Bastien and her daughter, whom she was carrying when she set the cards on their kitchen table, wrapped in a woolen cloth. Besides the cards was a small box full of chess queens from a variety of different sets. Through the next four decades, Godelieve and Bastien played a constantly evolving game with the cards and the variegated queens, the rules of which are all the more perplexing for their shifting, mutable nature.

Cyrille Lenentine, insensate spectator of this first shuffling, halting game, was truculent until her death on the subject of the actual rules. It is the current theory that each player chose a pair of queens and attempted, through the laying of card upon card in a massive spiral, to construct a story by which one might become the other. Cards could be played by opponents, it is assumed, against one another, halting or skewing the spiral-path. Thus if Godelieve began with a simple ebony queen and an ornate silver-crowned monarch, she might lay the Gargantua upon the Accountant’s Heartsease upon the Poor Lecheress and so on, to create a plausible path of no less than 66 cards, though some schools speculate that the number was greater even than that. It took hours to play, even days, and the tales that resulted were written in a large leather book and set aside with the family Bible.

For her birthday in 1932, Bastien presented his wife with a box of sea-pebbles in vivid shades of blue and green, and a new rule: a pebble placed upon a card inverted its meaning exactly, so that the Starveling became the Satiated, and so forth. Thus it became a tradition between the two to present each other with new rules and cards upon each holiday, and the complexity of their play exploded into a private language, as dizzying and vast as any arcane dialect.

When Cyrille reached the age of eight, she reports, her mother very solemnly took what was by then a large and heavy carved box out of the closet and opened it with all the ritual of Mass, removing the cards, the queens, the pebbles, the book–and by this time, also the rings, the dice, the pens, and the kings. They had had to purchase a new and enormous table to incorporate the ever-widening spirals of cards, and Cyrille learned wide-eyed the private past-time of her parents, and saw that there was a card for Godelieve, and one for Bastien, and a very new one with Cyrille written along the bottom edge. When she was twelve, the youngest Lenentine was allowed to create her first rule, which was, she reluctantly recorded, that the winner of the Christmas game could change any of the other rules they wished. The world of the Lenentine house was circumscribed entirely by the secret game, each birthday, each New Year punctuated by its forced evolution, every passing year, every passing snow and summer running parallel to baroque queens with mysterious intent traveling up and down their roads of cards.

It is here that Cyrille ceased her Virgilian guidance, and would lead no one further into the world of her mother’s game. “I cannot do it,” she wrote, “it would be like telling you what she looked like naked. It is ours, our own, and does not belong to you.”

Yet she willed to a local museum the carved box which by her own advanced age was over flowing, for she played solitary games long past her mother’s death and her father’s, the tables of her house growing steadily larger until they took up entire rooms. The ledgers which contained the complete record of their decades of intimate, secret play, however, were cremated with her, clutched in her dead and folded arms.

She had no children of her own. She taught no one else the game. Like the tables, the museums which acquired the Lenentine cards in batches and lots grew greater and greater, until they reached their current home, reassembled and whole.

Archivists by the dozen have played with the cards, with the queens, with the pebbles. They have constructed elaborate systems full of rules and sub-rules, structures of card and object and tale, but they cannot be sure that anything they play approaches the Lenentine practices. Still they play on, for the beauty of the objects contained in that old carved box, and because, they say, they cannot know if they stumble upon the real game, or have already done so, and so every game they play is plausibly the original, and, in the end and forever, they have faith.

[[Archive Group: Pantry. Lockwords: Memory Storage, Autobiographical Interface, User Corruption, Tether Systems, Lost Methodologies, Alternate Distribution Streams, Ludic Language Systems. Last Accessed 9.001.6.7.21, UIN# (47)663.5-9]]

Never Be Alone Again.

It has been estimated that some thirty-five people responded to the ad, and another seventeen the following year. However, it cannot be ascertained at this point whether these fifty-two participants comprised the entirety of mail-in replies or merely selected out of a larger pool. In either case, each of the fifty-two respondents received a package approximately six weeks after enclosing twelve dollars in an envelope and sending it to a P.O Box in St. Paul Minnesota. The package contained a simple lightboard, various cables, a 103A modem, and a black button that depressed with a satisfying click. Those given to perusing the advertisements of Scientific American had little trouble connecting the pieces. The lightboard sparkled with an array of small LEDs, in seemingly random formations — the button alone did not seem to have purpose or effect, lying dormant beside the cables. In fifty-two living rooms, puzzled men and women stared at the board, trying to understand the patterns of light. And patterns there were: around 5:00pm, a great number of lights flashed on, so too around 9:00 am. During business hours there was mostly blackness on the board. Late in the night, clusters shone, and in the pre-dawn hours, there were always one or two. Slowly fifty-two souls began to realize that the tiny lights must ignite when other users turned their systems on, that each LED was another person who had seen the St. Paul ad, so was staring intently at the board, who was alone, who was like them. The button presented a mystery — though each one of them experimented with it innumerable times, the lights did not seem to be affected. Through the winter, fifty-two boards glittered in the dark, and fifty-two people watched the other lights, steady, unblinking, silent and anonymous, but somehow comforting.

In St. Paul, Minnesota, Milo Barnes sat at the switchboard of an AT&T public branch exchange. He worked the night shift, connecting jack to jack, watching the lamps light as calls connected, the drone of human conversation in his ears. He was a quiet man, taciturn towards his fellow operators, isolated in his threadbare chair. One of the only black families in his rural hometown, he had never had many friends. His parents had been farmers: onions, greens, root vegetables. Milo had gone to the city after a brief try at college, and found himself enveloped by the warm arms of Ma Bell. He remained introverted and painfully shy, despite being surrounded by a cloud of lively talk every night. In the eighteen months that the 103A modems were active, he never mentioned his thoughts to anyone, was never caught taking them from branch offices, moved through the PBX like a ghost.

In March 1972, the lightboards began to blink. It was not a very great logical jump for Barnes’ enthusiasts to recognize Morse code, and it was, after all, a short and simple message, repeated endlessly.

All’s well that ends well yet

Rose-Marie Gascoigne of New Orleans was the first to answer. She had sat with her lightboard for hours each evening, accompanied by two disinterested tabbies. She said later that her heart had “just plain stopped” when the lights began to flicker on and off. “The whole world just held its breath. I could hear the blood rushing in my head. I knew what to do–what the hell else was that damn button for? It just took me a couple of days to work myself up to it. It was like sending a message to God.”

She reached out to the all but forgotten black button, and tried to remember what she knew of Morse.

She was not the last. Danny McKitterick sent his message from Portland just minutes after Rose-Marie, by all accounts, and in the very small hours of a Minnesota dawn, Milo Barnes sat breathless among his jacks and his lamps as one by one they flashed on and off, a slow and tremulous human server in the days before the whole of the world was networked thus, finishing his line, answering his brief, quiet message, lights in the dark:

Though time seem so adverse and means unfit though time seem so adverse and means unfit though time seem so adverse and means unfit

Over and over, again and again. Milo must have smiled–it is a comfort to think of him smiling. While the other operators worked around him, oblivious, he sent out a new message to each machine that had supplied the coded response he sought, and this one was simpler than the others, more direct, and more frightening.

Pick up the phone at midnight.

As the moon came up in St. Paul, Milo Barnes closed his eyes and slotted a silver jack into place. And another, and another. San Francisco to Cheyenne. Phoenix to Charlotte. Seattle to Sacramento.

New Orleans to Portland.

Milo sat among his lamps and wires, his hands taut, and held his breath.

In Louisiana, Rose-Marie Gascoigne held hers, and put her ear to her receiver.

“Hello?”

[[Archive Group: Attic. Lockwords: Operator Corruption, Aristotelian Drive, Tether Systems, Ur-Net, Lachesis Syndrome. Last Accessed 9.001.6.7.8, UIN# (47)663.5-9]]

Aemelia became obsessed with radio after her husband’s death in 1919. The War, she once said to her son, was too much for him to bear witnessing. Her predilection for electronics and mastery at such an advanced age is truly startling, and it cannot be denied that the world has overlooked in her a very great genius. Her children remember her as a sly and reclusive woman, given to cryptic smiles and long evenings in her study, a room in the rear of the great apartment, and the only one with a lock on its door. In this room was an astonishing array of radios in varying states of repair and disrepair. She did not speak much, a quiet soul whose command of English had never been total, and so in that May of 1921 her unruly brood were surprised to be assembled outside her mythic door to be given “a very great present.”

The very great presents were painstakingly assembled and painted metal discs with four large, though dormant, lights set into their surfaces. There were seventeen of them, and Brightshaupt never created any further discs, even when her youngest daughter was delivered of twins the next winter. Gathering her family around her, the old Swiss woman with her white hair in a neat bun told them how to play with their new treasures.

Red, blue, green, yellow, red, purple.

By all the available memoirs, this was the first sequence assigned to the children. They were to make this strange metal disc repeat the sequence. She gave the oldest ones a small notebook with an address in it and told them to run along, there would be hot buns and cocoa at dusk. Aemelia gave over the toys and told them nothing more. She shut her study door firmly behind her and disappeared into the faint, silvery sounds of static.

All seventeen Brightshaupt children obediently wound their way through the city to the address they had been given, which was a tall, Gothic radio transmission tower. Standing below it in a little circle, their little discs lit up. The lights wavered, green, blue, orange, white. Ghostly voices rose up from them, a blue light singing Italian opera in a thready, unearthly soprano, the orange one whispering about butlers and stolen silverware, the white reporting the stocks in a buzzing, indistinct monotone. The children were delighted, scrambling up stone walls and brownstone stairs to “get” different frequencies, screaming with laughter when one of Grandmother Aemelia’s colors shone true and clear. A middle child, Gibson, often overlooked, was the first to manage the correct sequence. He was declared the winner, bought an ice cream by the eldest boy, and carried home like a Roman champion, their rag-tag triumph proceeding down Fifth Avenue with songs and dancing.

In that charmed summer of 1921, Aemelia emerged from her study each morning with a new sequence for the little gang to discover. Each morning the address book contained another radio tower for them to explore. The Brightshaupt children ran from their cavernous rooms and into the city, becoming wild, a band of hunters seeking out frequencies with ruthlessness and cunning. They began, without prompting, to mark with colored chalk the best places in the city for the receipt of blue frequency, or red, the best place to hear the Yankees play while the disc flashed violet, the ideal location, if one hung upside down from the knees, to hear the barest whisper of a radio play concerning a beautiful and wretched refugee who would not abandon her lover in the desert. They marked these blessed spots, these sites of radio-grace, with their own sigil: BH contained within a triangle. These signs appeared all over the city that summer, and police worried over some new nefarious criminal element while the children stood on their tiptoes to get better reception, brighter colors, sweeter music. The first to achieve Grandmother’s sequence always received their ritual ice cream with much pomp.

Aemelia Brightshaupt died in 1925, by which time she had twenty-one grandchildren, some of whom still reside in the hidden catacombs of that vast apartment, despite the tidal changes of zoning restrictions. After the funeral, the children went solemnly to the first of their towers and huddled together, carefully balanced on the rooftop of an accountant’s office, the only place they had ever found which made the disc-lights flush close to black, a deep, strange purple. The faint notes of a grim organ march floated away from them on the wind.

The original seventeen guarded their secret game fiercely, and if not for little Gibson having become a journalist, they might never have become known, and Aemelia Brightshaupt, obscure saint, lost to dim and dusty memory. It is not beyond reason to call her the inventor of the handheld game; further connections to locative games such as geocaching are inescapable. Only eleven devices are accounted for today, and none has ever been available for made commercial sale or use.

[[Archive Group: Attic. Lockwords: Portable Devices, Warchalking, Tether Systems, Alternate Power Transmission, Feral Networks. Last Accessed 9.001.6.7.7, UIN# (47)663.5-9]]