In these appendices, I have tried to record first source player experiences of the Archive Materials. I have poured over these ethereal pages, their endless white letters, their constant promise. I have made my additions, my small notations. I have done my best. In my heart of hearts I call these notes daleths: easily carved, easily melted. In the Archive, they are cold, naked commentaries, and surely these wet, impure, sentimental preliminaries will be redacted in the ever-vigilant struggle against Contagion. This is as it should be. For personal reasons, the following is difficult for me to attach to the main entry on The Book, but secrets have earned me little but clay and ash: there is duty, and there is service.

I longed to put my hands into the silver cups of the great and final game from the time I was a child. I suppose you could call this morbid, disturbed, an unstable fixation, but the ways of children have always been morbid, disturbed, unstably fixed. I watched my mother slip her hands into the device before I could write my own name. I watched her pupils dilate; I watched her jaw grow slack. I heard her mumble in her sleep, whisper strange verses about emerald tablets, about scales of bone, about her soul weighed and wanting. I heard the music of her game, slow and sorrowing, violins and something else, something grinding and dissonant. She was beautiful, as she played, paler as the levels passed, and I wanted to play with her: what daughter does not wish to play alongside her mother? But it was a game in which I could never hope to best her score.

I have heard that it was invented by the members of a convent in a distant colony–someplace, in my imagination, full of wide, leafy trees and exotic fruit and hurricanes without eyes. The story goes that an outbreak of malaria brought the nuns low, and the Abbess Eglantyne the Wracked, a saint as uncanonical as it is possible for a saint to be, an initiate of Our Peculiar Mysteries, sought to soothe her sisters’ passage out of their bodies. She made for each of their hands ten silver cups with delicate wires extending outward, so that only the slightest movement of a feverish fingers would be required to play, and upon crystal screens before the beds of the dying awoke avatars with clothes of feathers and eyes of jet, descending into a great hole in the earth, to another world full of terrible battles and terrible triumph. The Abbess herself breathed her last within her office, before a cold, black screen, and the cups had to be cut from her hands. This is what I have been told. This is what my mother told me as she slipped the cups over the pads of her thumbs.

More than this I cannot say–how could I? In the cities of my birth only the dying may touch The Book. It is a rite, a sacrament, and it would be obscene for one as healthy and young as I to come within its presence. The infirm and the diseased take to enormous white beds with beatific smiles, knowing they are about to enter a select fraternity, they are about to know the secrets of a game they have heard only whispers of since they were small, a game forbidden until now, until this moment when nothing at all is forbidden any longer, they are eager, and burning to don their feathers and step into the dark, they are full of joy, and the cups have waited so long, so long until they felt their hearts shudder in premonition of their own last, bloody days.

The player dies as the game completes; the player dies as the game erases itself from the naked crystal. It is a perfect moment, perfect union, perfect expression of victory. I have long suspected that the cups deliver death from machine to flesh as they transmit desire from flesh to machine, but what could I know? There is no research to be done here, I must wait, and wait.

It will be years before I know what the feathers serve, what could be written upon tablets of emerald; it will be years before I will see myself in an orb of crystal, my eyes flashing jet.

Those who keep The Book, who build the devices, who fashion the cups, those acolytes who minister to the sick–should I call them players? The creatures in the crystal leap and jump and cry out in pain; those abed are motionless unless they weep–have no names to write in The Book. They will not be allowed to play when their time comes. There will be no feathers for them, no weighing of their souls. What martyrs are they, sweet and sad, solitary, to pass into death without the comfort of those colors opening up before them, without the warmth of silver on their hands!

They came to the house of my mother and slid the cups to her fingers like wedding bands, and when she was gone they went as quietly. They slapped my hands away; they would not let me see what widened her eyes, what quickened her breath. I only listened to the music, and cried at her closed door.

All my life I have written upon these tablets which are liquid and electricity and not emerald, I have recorded the games like a nun, in a distant place, with wide leafy trees over our peaked roofs and exotic fruits on our plates and yes, hurricanes that last for years with no eye in sight, in hope, in abject servitude. I dream as I have always dreamt, of little more than the small, saintly knock at my door, and a woman in green with a soft smile and ten silver cups gathered in her hands, to take me in her arms and show me the scale of bone, show me the weight of my soul.

But that is a long time yet, and there is work here, and the storm outside blows on.

[[Security ID: (21)787.6-9. Last Accessed 9.001.6.7.24, UIN# (47)663.5-9]]

What Happened to Agent Small? was a marvel of narrative complexity and surreal imagery, and as such was an almost complete failure. Despite its current reputation within a small cabal of dubious enthusiasts, it was outshone in its own time by later Karvina successes such as Gargantua, Guest at the Table of Heaven, and of course, Killswitch.

The game was a classic espionage scenario: Agent Small has disappeared, and Agent Thin, an indistinct avatar with a black hat and yellow trousers, descends into a strange country called Assumption in search of his partner. His weapon is a deck of red playing cards: each card dealt temporarily morphs into a weapon–the three of hearts is a small red pistol, the Jack of Spades a crossbow, etc. Each of these vanish within a short time frame. Thus only fifty-two weapons are available for the duration of the game, and if used too soon, leave Thin helpless long before the finale. He is pursued by the enemy agents Thomas A. Wilson and Thomas F. Wilson, (there appears to have been no translation issue, these were intentionally American names), desperately loyal lovers famous for having slit the President of Assumption’s throat with the edge of a palm leaf taken from an office topiary.

The object of the game was to acquire three scarlet diamonds before the Wilsons could–the jewels were necessary to a machine run by Agent Mire, the main antagonist, who sought to create a small, Earth-bound sun which would obliterate the world’s need for coal, and destroy several cities in the process. Agent Small had been on the same mission when she disappeared. Interestingly enough, however, the diamonds are never forthcoming at the conclusion of the levels, much like the princesses in the more popular Mario franchise. Agent Thin opens chest after chest to find them empty, unlocks door after door to find cobwebs and shadows. No message of encouragement, no friendly text to urge the player on.

Fully half of the game is spent in the Castle Hereupon, a complicated maze in which Agent Thin is repeatedly lost, battered, and tortured. At several points he is actually killed–there is no way to avoid this–and resurrected in the basement of the castle, first by a sad and helpless servant with a shock of pixellated blue hair, and subsequently by previous incarnations of himself. By the time he reaches Agent Mire, even the best players are on their third Thin Construct.

The final battle consists of a calm and ordered sniper hit (the King of Clubs becomes a rifle) on Agent Mire while he sits at an impossibly broad desk penning his autobiography, somewhat anti-climactic in the scheme of things, and the rescue of Agent Small, who had been kept in a medicine cabinet with her face pressed to the glass. Upon releasing her, she slowly opens her mouth to reveal the three red diamonds embedded in her jaw in place of the three teeth.

The game has an extraordinary amount of sexual content for its era, the Wilsons being very likely the first openly homosexual relationship in a video game narrative, and the long history of Thin and Small relayed in a series of textual cut scenes as the two leave the Castle. Apparently married and divorced twice, the doomed couple walk through the Castle grounds, which are littered with coal and machinery, returning to their world and their employers little better than they began.

Much has been made of the fact that it is a Thin Construct, and not Thin himself, who leaves the Castle with his partner. No comment can be made, as Karvina in its nascent stage may or may not have prefigured its later brilliance, may or may not have distastefully presented an infinite procession of avatars of avatars, may or may not have meant anything at all by it, and to speculate on such a matter shows a diseased mind.

The game, at any rate, was an utter catastrophe for the infant corporation. It is surprising that they recovered at all. Records indicate that a total of seventy-two copies were sold, and of those, sixty-one are now the property of the archives. The game was far below the standards of Karvina and is beneath the notice of any genuine player. It has been recommended by all high-level personnel that it be left to rot in dry storage. Its current occult popularity is entirely spurious and its acolytes to be pitied.

[[Archive Group: Pantry. Lockwords: Karvina Corporation, Alternate Distribution Streams, Orpheus Scenarios, Memory Storage, Index Librorum Prohibitorum
. Last Accessed 9.001.6.7.21, UIN# (47)663.5-9]]

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]]

From what documentation survives it can be gleaned that she was born in 1950, the child of two engineers, possessed of a twin brother, Viljami, with whom she was extremely close. They were brilliant children, even prodigies, and inseparable until her marriage at the age of twenty-three. Viljami died in an airplane crash over the North Sea in 1974, and Irja’s husband Evgeniy left her four years later and returned to then-Soviet Estonia, where his family kept cattle and encouraged his second marriage to a woman whose name has been lost. It would seem that Pentintytär did not leave her house after 1980, and Torvald Leppo, 11 years of age, discovered her body while making his ailing father’s morning rounds, delivering her milk. He was nearly catatonic for weeks afterward, unable to speak, while the house was boarded up and a search for next of kin commenced. No amount of milk and brandy seemed to soften the child, until his father went to bathe his boy and found Torvald’s bed empty.

Torvald could not leave the house alone. He had returned night after night to the place that Irja Pentintytär had built for herself. For the house contained no furniture or belongings which might have comforted a young woman grieving the loss of her marriage and her brother–a few dresses hung in her closet, one pair of shoes sat neatly by the door. The rest of the rooms were crowded with standing game machines, a closely packed arcade not unlike a labyrinth. Even before Irja’s body had been collected, Torvald had pushed a 1 markka piece into the only machine which seemed to have a coin-slot, painted with flowing brown letters that read: Herkkusieni!

The game was simple: a sprite with angular red braids labeled above the score as SISKO collects pixelated mushrooms in a forest until she has enough to fill her basket. She has a small pig to help her dig and offer zen-like, porcine, barely translatable advice such as: Do not kiss the tree stump with enthusiasm. The mushrooms slowly increase in size and vary in color until Sisko must chase after behemoth fungi bigger than her basket and herself, expanding beyond the edges of the screen. Behind her as she seeks floats a second red-headed sprite labeled VEIKKO, a silent boy whose feet do not touch the ground, and who does nothing throughout the game but watch Sisko with her mushrooms and her pig, a constant, if impotent, companion.

Torvald completed Herkkuseini! on his second night at the Pentintytär house. As the Sisko-sprite disappeared into a gargantuan mushroom, his markka piece hurtled from the rear of the machine through a slender pneumatic tube and into a second game, and the Leppo boy hurtled after it, eager to play, eager to follow deeper into the things whose creation had consumed Pentintytär’s final years. His coin had deposited itself in Keskenään kotona Aho, in which Veikko from the previous game travels through a series of green meadows, beset with small beetles and strawberry-monsters, sparrows with oversized talons and fawns with enormous ears, all of which he fights with a wooden sword and the braided Sisko floating behind him, silent, observing. From this Torvald’s markka hurtled into Kalastaa ja Toivottu, a fishing game where Torvald held a pole in his hands much like other arcade-players held plastic guns, and caught oblong pink pike from a bright blue pond, choosing with each catch a reward of points, gold, or wishes, which he wrote into the wish-screen like high-score initials, only to watch them vanish into blackness and not return. I wish my father’s cows gave more milk. I wish I had a red bicycle. I wish these games would not end.

Kicking his feet in the water was red-haired Veikko, though he caught no fish of his own.

Torvald played through the house for weeks. He did not always understand the games, which always starred the same two sprites, alternating in agency, but never separate: in Eksynyt Morsian Sisko fought her way through the cupolas of the Kremlin only to wed the final enemy in a bizarre cut scene, a black, boxy man with red shoes. Her opposite number watched, in approval or disapproval his primitively animated face made it impossible to tell. A flight simulator called Mielipaha flew over an endless ocean; in Keskenään kotona Ankea the two sprites walked together through a long grey wasteland in search of a crown of squarish roses. The coin sped through each machine as Torvald completed the game–and finally, while his father was discovering an empty bed, the markka settled into a sleek black game which frightened him, a game in which there was no Sisko, only the boy, wandering in a black field, lost, without enemies or reward. In later years Torvald would swear that the beeps and echoes of the game sounded like a woman weeping. The words Viljami kotona Alamaailma were scratched in small white letters on the side of the game, as if with the edge of a fork or a key.

After nearly twelve hours of play, an admirable marathon for a child of Torvald’s age, but through no efforts of his own, Sisko with her red-braids appeared in the northwest corner of the screen, holding out her arms to her counterpart, her Veikko. Torvald moved his avatar towards her with his heart in his throat, and the two figures merged, flooding the black screen with blue light.

Torvald’s coin clattered out of the machine, a neat, star-shaped hole punched through its middle. Herkkusieni! would not accept it again, and before he could earn another markka, the Leppo boy’s father collected him with much anger and relief, and the house was firmly locked, while the child wept and bit his mother and screamed to be let back in.

Torvald would wear his markka on a chain around his neck for the rest of his life. He visited Irja’s grave often, laying faded markka coins on the grass.

In 1998, he managed to purchase the last of the Pentintytär Arcade from a reticent collector in Tallinn, and had the set installed in his Helsinki home. When the last tube was in place, he sat naked in their center with a small gun in his hands, calling out Irja’s name into the labyrinth, over and over.

[[Archive Group: Pantry. Lockwords: Memory Storage, Autobiographical Interface, User Corruption, Single Use Systems, Directional Control, Alternate Distribution Streams. Last Accessed 9.001.6.7.20, UIN# (47)663.5-9]]

However, logarithmic tables did not fully occupy Aurifaber’s imagination. A dreamy child, he had surprised his parents by excelling at Cambridge in mathematics and literature, often changing his cap between calculus and Middle English so as not to be thought poorly of. Thus it is perhaps not surprising that Aurifaber, when closeted with the Scheutzian machine in London, began to surreptitiously instruct it in a simple number game in which the small balding man encouraged the bulky machine to “guess” what number he was thinking of. By narrowing the parameters with each “guess” output, he successfully engaged the analytical engine in play. But this did not, ultimately, satisfy Aurifaber.

Many believe at this point that Aurifaber succumbed to his family’s sad prediclition for gin, and this accounts for his mangling of Babbage’s original intent, and while this may or may not have been a factor in his admittedly bizarre actions, it is true that eventually Aurifaber began to feed Jacquard loom punch cards into his engine. He did not, however, use them to store primitive programs, but fed in raw cards which dictated five-pointed leaves, daffodils, English roses, Greek urns.

The effect of these cards on the functionality of the machine was extreme. It began attempting to guess what number Aurifaber was thinking of based upon these bizarre parameters.

Aurifaber offered no further numerative input, and the Scheutzian engine struggled with the problem. Finally, it extruded one of the cards, whose punches had been altered. However, the engine refused to read the card it had generated, and Aurifaber was at a loss as to how to interpret the machine’s solution.

By then, however, Scheutz had constructed a second analytical engine, which resided in the United States. Aurifaber, though mortally afraid of the water, made the long crossing in order to see the other machine. Perhaps it was gin that inspired this strange solution to an unreadable card. Perhaps not. In either case, once in the New World Aurifaber inserted the card long carried in his valise, and the new engine responded by furiously punching holes in its response tape as though it were a plain card. Aurifaber proceeded to manufacture the cards dictated by the American engine, and spent the next dozen years ferrying cards he could not read between the two machines.

One ought not to judge such a unique mind on its ability to reach obvious conclusions–that is a pedestrian pursuit that must be left to the likes of us. In his old age, Aurifaber allowed his daughter Alice to examine the cards which had become so precious to him. It was she who finally inserted the cards into a Jacquard loom and allowed it to weave out the machine’s correspondence.

The extraordinary tapestry woven by Alice currently hangs in the British Museum of Antiquities.

What emerges is essentially a complex guessing game. The English engine had begun to seek further parameters when Aurifaber ceased his input. The American machine also attempted to interpret the basic floral and abstract designs of the Jacquard loom cards by the same criteria as its opposite number: seeking an impossible “correct” number hidden among the myriad symbols and designs presented to it. The tapestry begins with uncertain flowers with stems of numbers, but quickly devolves into combinations of paisley, cartouches, egg-and-dart designs of incredible density. The two engines found a correct answer impossible to determine, and Alice herself called the tapestry: “a gorgeous horror which my heart shall never fully defeat.”

The two machines are now housed in Berlin, in adjoining rooms, and with extreme care are allowed to continue their game, the first recorded, though certainly not the last, in which two computers played one another, using a human psyche as console.

[[Archive Group: Attic. Lockwords: Operator Corruption, Sneakernet, Accidental Artifacts, Scheutz Inversion, Unbounded Nondeterminism. Last Accessed 9.001.6.7.13, UIN# (47)663.5-9]]

The game was “Killswitch.”

On the surface it was a variant on the mystery or horror survival game, a precursor to the Myst and Silent Hill franchises. The narrative showed the complexity for which Karvina was known, though the graphics were monochrome, vague grey and white shapes against a black background. Slow MIDI versions of Czech folksongs play throughout. Players could choose between two avatars: an invisible demon named Ghast or a visible human woman, Porto. Play as Ghast was considerably more difficult due to his total invisibility, and players were highly liable to restart the game as Porto after the first level, in which it was impossible to gauge jumps or aim. However, Ghast was clearly the more powerful character–he had fire-breath and a coal-steam attack, but as it was above the skill level of most players to keep track of where a fire-breathing, poison-dispensing invisible imp was on their screens once the fire and steam had run out, Porto became more or less the default.

Porto’s singular ability was seemingly random growth–she expanded and contracted in size throughout the game. A Kansas engineering grad claimed to have figured out the pattern involved, but for reasons which will become obvious, his work was lost.

Porto awakens in the dark with wounds in her elbows, confused. Seeking a way out, she ascends through the levels of a coal mine in which it is slowly revealed she was once an employee, investigating its collapse and beset on all sides by demons similar to Ghast, as well as dead foremen, coal-golems, and demonic inspectors from the Sovatik corporation, whose boxy bodies were clothed in red, the only color in the game. The environment, though primitive, becomes genuinely uncanny as play progresses. There are no “bosses” in any real sense–Porto must simply move physically through tunnels to reach subsequent levels while her size varies wildly through inter-level spaces.

The story that emerges through Porto’s discovery of magnetic tapes, files, mutilated factory workers who were once her friends, and deciphering an impressively complex code inscribed on a series of iron axes players must collect (This portion of the game was almost laughably complex, and defeated many players until “Porto881″ posted the cipher to a Columbia BBS. Attempts to contact this player have been unsuccessful, and the username is no longer in use on any known service.) is that the foremen, under pressure to increase coal production, began to falsify reports of malfunctions and worker malfeasance in order to excuse low output, which incited a Sovatik inspection. Officials were dispatched, one for each miner, and an extraordinary story of torture unfolds, with fuzzy and indistinct graphics of red-coated men standing over workers, inserting small knives into their joints whenever production slowed. (Admittedly, this is not a very subtle critique of Soviet-era industrial tactics, and as the town of Karvina itself was devastated by the departure of the coal industry, more than one thesis has interpreted Killswitch as a political screed.)

After solving the axe-code, Porto finds and assembles a tape recorder, on which a male voice tells her that the fires of the earth had risen up in their defense and flowed into the hearts of the decrepit, pre-revolution equipment they used and wakened them to avenge the workers. It is generally assumed that the “fires of the earth” are demons like Ghast, coal-fumes and gassy bodies inhabiting the old machines. The machines themselves are so “big” that the graphics elect to only show two or three gear-teeth or a conveyor belt rather than the entire apparatus. The machines drove the inspectors mad, and they disappeared into caverns with their knives (only to emerge to plague Porto, of course). The workers were often crushed and mangled in the onslaught of machines, who were neither graceful nor discriminating. Porto herself was knocked into a deep chasm by a grief-stricken engine, and her
fluctuating size, if it is real and not imagined, is implied to be the result of poisonous fumes inhaled there.

What follows is the most cryptic and intuitive part of the game. There is no logical reason to proceed in the “correct” way, and again it was Porto881 who came to the rescue of the fledgling Killswitch community. In the chamber behind the tape recorder is a great furnace where coal was once rendered into coke. There are no clues as to what she is intended to do in this room. Players attempted nearly everything, from immolating herself to continuing to process coal as if the machines had never risen up. Porto881 hit upon the solution, and posted it to the Columbia boards. If Porto ingests the raw coke, she will find her body under control,and can go on to fight her way out of the final levels of the mine, which are impassable in her giant state, clutching the tape containing this extraordinary story. However, as she crawls through the final tunnel to emerge aboveground, the screen goes suddenly
white.

Killswitch, by design, deletes itself upon player completion of the game. It is not recoverable by any means, all trace of it is removed from the user’s computer. The game cannot be copied. For all intents and purposes it exists only for those playing it, and then ceases to be entirely. One cannot replay it, unlocking further secrets or narrative pathways, one cannot allow another to play it, and perhaps most importantly, it is impossible to experience the game all the way to the end as both Porto and Ghast.

Predictably, player outcry was enormous. Several routes to solve the problem were pursued, with no real efficacy. The first and most common was to simply buy more copies of the game, but Karvina Corp. released only 5,000 copies and refused to press further editions. The following is an excerpt from their May 1990 press release:

Killswitch was designed to be a unique playing experience: like reality, it is unrepeatable, unretrievable,and illogical. One might even say ineffable. Death is final; death is complete. The fates of Porto and her beloved Ghast are as unknowable as our own. It is the desire of the Karvina Corporation that this be so, and we ask our customers to respect that desire. Rest assured Karvina will continue to provide the highest quality of games to the West, and that Killswitch is merely one among our many wonders.

This did not have the intended effect. The word “beloved” piqued the interest of committed, even obsessive players, as Ghast is not present in any portion of Porto’s narrative. A rush to find the remaining copies of the game ensued, with the intent of playing as Ghast and discovering the meaning of Karvina’s cryptic word. The most popular theory was that Ghast would at some point become the fumes inhaled by Porto, changing her size and beginning her adventure. Some thought this was wishful thinking, that if only Ghast’s early levels were passable one would somehow be able to play as both simultaneously. However, by this time no further copies appeared to be available in retail outlets. Players who had not yet completed the game attempted Ghast’s levels frequently, but the difficulty of actually playing this enigmatic avatar persisted, and no player has ever claimed to have finished the game as Ghast. One by one, the lure of Porto’s lost, unearthly world drew them back to her, and one by one, they were compelled towards the finality of the vast white screen.

To find any copy usable today is an almost unfathomably rare occurance; a still shrink-wrapped copy was sold at auction in 2005 for $733,000 to Yamamoto Ryuichi of Tokyo. It is entirely possible that Yamamoto’s is the last remaining copy of the game. Knowing this, Yakamoto had intended to open his play to all enthusiasts, filming and uploading his progress. However, to date, the only film which has surfaced is a one minute and forty five second clip of a haggard Yamamoto at his computer, the avatar-choice screen visible over his right shoulder.

Yamamoto is crying.

[[Archive Group: Pantry. Lockwords: Encrypted Dongle, Karvina Corporation, Permadeath, Alternate Distribution Streams. Last Accessed 9.001.6.7.10, 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]]