[Chapter VII, concluded]
In the rocking boat, with the sound of the motor beneath us, you dream
of a ceremony on a clifftop with our two families seated looking on, and us in a long white dress, carrying a bouquet of scrabble tiles, walking down an aisle alone to be formally unified with ourself
of wearing a suit and meeting with some very rich men to talk about how to bring my language to Africa, and Brock giving us advice about how to handle them
of gathering all the indigenous languages, all the little dying languages, all the languages shoved aside because they lack linguistic efficacy, into a firefly bottle, where their letterforms flicker desperately
Please press SPACE to continue.
72 hours later
Your Bunk (aboard the True Macaque) (on your bed)
Amazing: it’s even tinier than my apartment, and the bed isn’t even a twin in width. Across from the bed is a built-in bench, with portholes above, just at the waterline.
Your wardrobe door is firmly closed, which is helpful because otherwise it is tricky walking around in here.
[Your score has gone up by fifteen points and is now ninety-nine.]
So here we are in an extended denouement; that dream sequence largely covers the territory, I think, but there are a couple of small bonuses and Easter eggs we can track down here. Oh, and the map’s updated!
(Upper deck)
(Lower deck)
First, though, we’re currently empty-handed; did we lose all our stuff?
>x bed
Homely but familiar.
your bed has two drawers. Neither are open.
(That “your” should be capitalized…)
>open left
You open the left drawer of your bed, revealing a word, a tint, a top, pi, a weight, a clock, a lie, a leer, some oil, a rodeo beaker, a god, a May, a dirty coffee cup, some balm, a shuttle, a poppy, a sticky, a shrimp tail, a crumpled cocktail napkin, a silver platter, History of the Standards Revolution, Studies in Primary Language Acquisition, a ball, a leaflet, a band, a funnel, a roll, Guidebook to Anglophone Atlantis, a flash drive, an army, and a clipping.
>open right
You open the right drawer of your bed, revealing a paper, a jigsaw, a mug, a cross, a pass, a member, a draft document, Lives of the Lexicographers, a key, Journal of Third-World Economics, a map of Slangovia, a shopping bag, a stuffed octopus, a jotter, and some financial records.
Our tools are gone, but most of our stuff is here, plus two new items:
>x clipping
This is a clipping from your hometown paper, from when you took second place in a national spelling bee at the age of twelve. Years of training and study, practice every night of the week, and your parents were satisfied when you placed second. They were proud. Your mother gave an interview on TV.
All that stuff about the struggle to achieve perfection as man’s gift back to God, or whatever? They made that up. They were happy to cash in on your not-quite-perfect performance in the end, happy to be local celebrities for two weeks, happy to tell everyone how they trained you up and what good parents they were. You were humiliated by your loss at the last moment, and they didn’t care. Enter Slango in your life, and cue your departure; and you haven’t seriously looked back since.
…Well. If I may be permitted a word (and I don’t see how you could stop me, sorry): I don’t think they were hypocrites. I think they meant well. But I can understand how all that would have done a heck of a job on your head.
…yeah I’m Team Alex here; Andra’s drive to perfection makes here a better spy, I suppose, but her folks not making her feel bad for “only” taking second place is like the first good thing we’ve heard about them.
>x financial
Brock and Slango managed for you at first, depositing your part of job commissions into a Swiss bank account. It is only recently that you’ve started to branch out in managing that money. After your wire transfer to your brother, you have only a few tens of thousands of dollars left, but that will change when you get your share for rescuing the plans of the T-inserter.
Not a huge sum in the grand scheme of things, but then, I doubt we pay rent on our berth.
>x bench
It’s hard and less comfortable than a sofa, but it is adequate for seating on the rare occasions when a second person comes into your room. Mostly you read on the bed.
>x portholes
Perhaps I should drop any attempt to sound nautical and just call them windows, because they are not the round things one normally thinks of. But they are waterproof and just above the water line.
There’s some more of our stuff in the wardrobe:
>open wardrobe
You open your wardrobe, revealing a swatch, a wig, a shred, a counter, a coat, a ring, a pair of Britishizing goggles, a monocle, a backpack, a sundress, a black turtleneck, some trousers, and a swimsuit.
I’m amused by the thought that we’re just going to be wearing that wig whenever we feel like it, now.
Again, some of this stuff is new:
>x sundress
Bought during a vacation in Nauplia. It was tempting to look like the other tourists. And why not?
>x turtleneck
It averts attention and is useful on jobs.
>x trousers
Close-fitting and dark colored, useful to wear when going places sneakily by night.
>x swimsuit
Often the only form of exercise available is swimming off the back of the True Macaque, and Slango insists that you and Brock do this daily if on-shore forms of exertion are not available. It’s a one-piece suit, meant for function rather than show.
Alex balks at putting on the sundress or swimsuit, and poor guy has a lot to adjust to right now, so I put on the turtleneck and trousers (despite our clothing being abstracted in the game proper, if we try to leave our cabin without doing so we get told we need to put something on first).
>out
Galley (aboard the True Macaque)
Smaller than the kitchen in a comfortable house, but carefully and elegantly fitted, with an electric stovetop, a convection oven/microwave, a tiny refrigerator, a sink: enough, in short, to serve the crew of three on long trips. I guess even a fairly big boat is still small on the inside, eh?
There’s even a little washing machine, for items too big to hand-wash in the sink.
On the built-in table are a newspaper and a pan.
On the port wall, built-in shelves hold a battered selection of games.
Oh, this does seem cozy!
The pan is of course the plans, and reading the newspaper ends the game, so we’ll check out everything else.
>x machine
It’s efficient enough, but only works when plugged into water and power in a marina. It would be too draining to run off the yacht’s resources in open sea.
Besides, you don’t have a dryer, which means laundry has to be put up on a string above-decks, and that’s not a practical thing to do when you might be having to make a fast get-away in the near future.
It’s empty – not so the fridge:
You open the galley refrigerator, revealing a heel, some toes, a rash, and a jar of caviar.
OK our idea of what counts as “edible” is horrifying (the caviar I think is new, but alas, don’t think we can v-remove that even if we had our kit).
>x caviar
Most of it is gone, used up in Brock’s great crepes experiment of last weekend.
Ugh that sounds terrible?
By the way, compass directions don’t work on the yacht – we need to go aft-starboard to get back to our room.
>x games
Oh, all sorts: Boggle and Scrabble, which you always win and which therefore Brock and Slango only play when they’re in a mood for cheering you up. Monopoly, dusty with disuse. Puerto Rico. Arkham Horror. It’s surprising what even Brock will admit to being amused by in the course of a long evening at sea.
Ha, once again, very late-aughts. I do like Arkham Horror, though the idea of setting up all those tiny cardboard pieces on a small ship’s table – with waves making everything tilt this way and that – is the real eldritch terror.
>f
Brock’s Stateroom (aboard the True Macaque)
Bigger than your bunk or Slango’s, Brock’s space takes the whole width of the yacht here, with windows out both sides, and a double bed.
The shape of hull in this part of the yacht means that the room is much narrower fore than aft, the walls sweeping grandly outward from the head of Brock’s bed. It looks like the bed of Captain Horndog, Space Womanizer. If you ask me.
You can see a tub of restoration gel here.
You can also see an anagramming gun, some Origin Paste, and your B-remover here.
Oh, Brock wound up with all our best stuff! Wonder how that happens.
Poor Alex is understandably a bit repulsed at any indication that Andra has had, and might again have, sex with Brock.
>x bed
Brock affects a kind of ruffled bachelor style, which means that his bed is made but the blankets suggestively rumpled. It is an open question whether he rumples them himself on purpose.
His bed also has two drawers:
You open the left drawer of Brock’s bed, revealing a mess of cabling and an expensive laptop.
…
You open the right drawer of Brock’s bed, revealing some DVDs.
>x dvds
A stack of unlabeled data DVDs in clear plastic cases. They could be anything: backup information on the jobs you’ve done, his music collection, porn. Knowing Brock, you would guess some of all three.
>x cabling
Power adaptors for various different plug styles; ethernet, USB, firewire cables ranging from new to nearly obsolete formats; security devices, dongles, things I don’t even recognize.
>x laptop
It’s Brock’s favorite object in the whole world: glossy display, unibody aluminum shell, vast hard drive. He uses it to research jobs and set up contacts.
The expensive laptop is currently switched off.
Huh, I didn’t realize Brock was our tech guy. Maybe he should stick to that, rather than field work.
>turn it on
(opening and starting up the expensive laptop)
The expensive laptop chimes cheerfully.A box on the screen invites you to type a password to proceed.
Oh, blarg, we don’t have the password anymore (since we needed the pass), but we could have synthesized it again at the dais had we known.
>>ap
Brock’s Head (aboard the True Macaque)
Brock has gotten the best accommodations in this respect as well: his bathroom is less cramped than the others aboard, and the mirror is bigger.
No need to subject Alex to any more time in here (Andra’s cabin has a head too, though I didn’t show it off earlier: “All the absolutely required amenities of a bathroom, packed into the least possible space. The international space station assigns more room to the bathroom functions.”) We head back to the galley and:
>ap
Slango’s Bunk (aboard the True Macaque)
Just as tiny as yours, with a bed narrower than a standard twin, and its own miniature head, and drawers cunningly fitted under the bed to hold clothing and other necessities.
The yacht rolls gently under the influence of an especially strong wave.
>x bed
Hospital corners, military precision. Slango never actually served in the armed forces to the best of your knowledge, but that hasn’t stopped him acting like it.
There are drawers, again, but if we try to open them:
Neither of us is quite comfortable invading Slango’s privacy in that way.
We do feel comfortable invading his privacy by entering his head, but it’s got the same description as ours.
We can also climb up from the galley to reach the deck:
Navigation Area (aboard the True Macaque)
A command chair waits at the controls, a mass of buttons and levers and a tiny, low-mounted steering wheel that seems like an awfully small device to control such a high-powered machine. But I’ll take your word that it works.
The Galley is just below, down a steep staircase that is almost a ladder.
>x chair
Cushioned for long use, and upholstered in some kind of specially-engineered UV-resistant leather.
Sadly, we can’t make this U-resistant leather to get our last checkbox ticked.
>x controls
It’s curious, looking at these and knowing I’ve never touched them before in my life, and yet having your instinctive muscular knowledge of what they’re all for and how they work. I feel like I could sit down and drive the yacht, and at the same time I find the idea terrifying.
(We can sit down in the chair, but are not allowed to actually drive the yacht, which is probably for the best).
>f
Foredeck (aboard the True Macaque)
Here the yacht is nothing but a nose over the water. A hatch, hardly big enough for a portly person, descends into the so-called crew cabin.
>d
You open the hatch.
Crew Cabin (aboard the True Macaque)
It was meant to be mine, before we turned out to be inseparable It’s… Spartan. But I didn’t pay for expensive accommodations. Oh, yes, and I can understand that it must be a bother for you to give up the storage space.
I’m fascinated to note what shape a bed can be when it’s not rectangular. More sort of curved and tapering. Convenient if you’re called on to house a mermaid.
Hmm, I’m curious where Alex was buying passage to. Or was his plan to join the crew until he figured out immediate next steps?
(There’s a missing period before “It’s… Spartan”).
>x bed
It is fitted into the curve of the yacht wall, which is strongly bent here, so that the foot of the bed is tapered and narrow.
As always, there are drawers, but they’re empty.
And that’s the tour! Nothing to do now but settle in and read the paper.
It’s the Chard-Farmer’s Daily from Atlantis. A huge headline is splashed across the front:
“REFERENDUM ANNOUNCED!”
The picture on the front shows the Atlantida statue decked out with lights like a Christmas tree and people posing next to her for pictures.
My father has been promoted, apparently, to something called the Provisional Committee for Orthographic Reform. He is quoted as saying that the amnesty for Cold Storage prisoners is an important step forward. “Of course, government by citizen referendum brings its own problems, and further constitutional work may be needed if we mean to bring Atlantis in line with the European Union.”
Brock comes down and hands us a coffee. “You look like you could use this. We’ve hit Mallorca,” he says. “Slango’s in town resupplying. I guess you saw the paper?”
You nod.
“One for the history books,” he says, with a crooked smile. “They’re showing satellite clips. Big olive garland on the depluralizing tank. People dancing on cars. Some old guy belting out La Marseillaise in the Bureau Rotunda.”
Brock sits down opposite us. “In other news,” he remarks, “it looks like your cut of the T-inserter plans, with all the tests we ran, is going to come out to this.” He writes a number. The number has six zeroes.
He leans back and looks at us.
“So. Where do we go from here?”
*** The End ***
In that game you scored 99 out of a possible 100, in 1397 turns, earning you the rank of Enemy of the State.
Would you like to RESTART, RESTORE a saved game, QUIT, UNDO the last command, review your final SCORE, reveal what ACHIEVEMENTS you have yet to accomplish, or learn about some of the SOURCES used in creating this game?
A heart-warming ending – sure, the people of Atlantis have much left to do to reclaim their society for themselves, and Alexandrea – and Brock – have a lot to figure out. But we’ve definitely all made a difference, and got paid for doing it – and with Alex’s flash drive, we might be able to do even more for the world soon.
Some interesting end-game options here, but we’ll start with the score:
You have earned 99 points:
3 points for lifting animate limits on the letter-remover
10 points for acquiring a sought-after invitation
3 points for breaking the Spirit of Atlantis (in cardboard form)
5 points for passing the secretarial test
1 point for using the T-inserter
3 points for profiling the T-inserter
1 point for using the anagramming gun
1 point for using the vowel rotator
15 points for returning to the yacht
1 point for using the letter-remover
3 points for passing through the temporary barrier
3 points for winning the gel
1 point for using the gel
3 points for opening the locker
3 points for retrieving the backpack
1 point for using the spinner
3 points for fueling our car
3 points for repairing our car
5 points for traveling by car
3 points for winning a barroom bet
3 points for arranging contact with Slango through his lady friend
5 points for meeting Slango
1 point for using the Origin Paste
3 points for visiting the dead drop
1 point for getting a product of the homonym paddle
3 points for reading a legend
3 points for lifting abstraction limits on the letter-remover
3 points for gaining access to the synthesizer
2 points for returning a library book to its proper home
1 point for using the synthesizer
3 points for acquiring a keycardYou have not yet removed v from anything.
The achievements you have accomplished so far include:
Alex Rosehip award for completing the game in easy mode
Finished tutorial mode
Igor Rosehip award for creating at least five body parts in one playthrough
Propper Rosehip award for talespinning
Not bad, but we missed one last lousy point and failed to get that v.
> achievements
These achievements you have yet to accomplish:Admiral Thoureaux award for removing every letter of the alphabet in one playthrough
Amanda Waterstone award for discovering cultic passages
Andra award for completing the game in hard mode
Camilla Downdweller award for creating five types of fish in one playthrough
Finn Rosehip award for gnu-hunting
Horace Fingerstain award for jotting some notes
Jocasta Higgate award for reconstructing pagan worship on the island
Lester Parsons award for discovering unspecified local rites
Lord Michael Rosehip award for showing the black spot to a pirate crew
Lucius Quagmire award for viewing unusual films
Mort Shaply award for showing Poe a raven-based foodstuff
Priscilla Parsons award for winning the game without ever entering the church
Reverend Plaice award for placing the cross on the altar while liturgically dressed
Roman “Sticky” Fingerstain award for impromptu art theft
Oh, wow, that’s a lot! A few of these I have some ideas on how to get, but we clearly missed a lot.
> sources
I started working in earnest on this game in 2008. Since that time, the US has undergone two presidential elections; for months, the Occupy Seattle protests filled a city block just a short stroll from my apartment; and the successes and failures of the Arab Spring were constantly in the news. These experiences introduced more serious themes into what was initially a purely silly game.
Gene Sharp’s From Dictatorship to Democracy and the documentary How to Start a Revolution helped me think about peaceful revolutions and the communication of dissent within totalitarian regimes.
The history of Atlantis’ colonization mirrors that of nearby Gibraltar, on the theory that the same powers would have been likely to take an interest. Wikipedia supplied most of the potted history I used for this.
Arika Okrent’s In the Land of Invented Languages and Mark Rosenfelder’s Language Construction Kit (first a website, subsequently a book) taught me a lot about existing constructed languages and helped me imagine what might interest Atlantean academics.
Poor Economics (Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo) provided some general background about different attempts to address global poverty, contributing to the Atlantean concept of utopian linguistics (and why it hadn’t yet saved the world).
The Scrabble dictionary and the internet anagram server, among others, helped me map out the puzzle space systematically.
Hundreds of other small details came out of YouTube or Wikipedia, from the composition of classic cocktails to the mating behavior of pigs. Background for specific elements may be found in the game’s source text.
Some interesting details here that I won’t go into for now – I’ll probably say more about the game’s politics at some point – but I’m curious about our resident linguistic-expert’s thoughts on the relevant sources.
So that’s a satisfying ending, but there’s certainly more to do – alternate paths we didn’t take, cleaning up that last point, hunting for achievements, and the hard mode others in the thread have mentioned (I don’t see a note about how to activate it, maybe because I didn’t get a full 100 point score, but I checked and restarting and typing HARD does the trick). So I think we’ll have to see about some bonus updates, though it might be a bit before I get to them.
In the meantime, thanks all for reading and adding your thoughts – it’s been lots of fun to experience this seminal piece of IF alongside y’all!
CM session 7 transcript.txt (279.5 KB)