Enter the game

F1R3GAMES · SESSION TRACE

A voice, before there is anything to see. Light and quick and not entirely friendly, a voice that seems to have been made for laughing at people.

“There you are. No, don’t look for me. You won’t find me on the screen; nothing keeps me there for long. Call me Robin. Everyone does, eventually, and the ones who don’t call me worse.

“You’ve come to play. Good. I’m obliged to tell you some things first, and I’m obliged to tell you the truth, because I can’t do otherwise. Remember that. I may decline to answer you. I will never lie to you. That makes me the most trustworthy thing you will meet in here, which ought to worry you more than it does.”

“The game is a book. The book is a braid of three strands. One strand is a woman and a machine talking about what the book should become. One strand is two young people who know the stories by heart. One strand is the two people the stories are about, who don’t. The strands cross. You’ll feel the crossings. Some of them come undone and are done again. That isn’t a mistake. Well. Some of it is a mistake. The rest is what the mistakes became.

“Before you choose a door, the rules of engagement. You’ll want to read them. People never do.”

“You haven’t. Nobody has. It’s all right; I said you could decline things. Rule ten is the one to keep in your pocket. Everyone who ever got lost in these stories got lost without being told. The forum readers. A cellist with her tea going cold. A girl on a train who couldn’t remember what she used to do with her evenings. Nobody asked them. I’m asking you. That’s the difference between this and what came before. It isn’t much. It’s everything.

“Now. Choose a door.”

“Istanbul. Forged maps that turn out not to be forged. A coastline that shouldn’t exist. That one’s locked, I’m afraid. Not because you can’t have it. Because it isn’t finished being true yet. Ask me again in another book.”

“A ship, a passenger, three words in a language she won’t name. Short. Very short. You’d be out by supper. You don’t want that; I can tell. Nobody comes here wanting to be out by supper.”

“A theft that made a real thing out of an absence. Lovely. It’s also the key to everything in the door you’re about to choose, so you’ll get it anyway, in pieces, from someone who loves it.”

“Of course you did. They all do, in the end, the ones who come this far. A band. A concert. A murder that hasn’t happened yet. A night when the walls come down.

“Tokens. You’ll earn them, a few at a time, for reading rather than scrolling and for saying things other players answer. They buy one thing: a seat at the author’s table, where the woman in the first strand sits with the machine. A seat buys you listening, and a question. It does not buy you the story. Nothing does.

“One more thing, and then I’ll go quiet and let you read. You’ll be asked your name, near the end. You don’t have to answer. But you should know it’s coming, because the last time anyone in my line of work carried a child out of a story, nobody asked his.”